THE IVY LEAGUE

Back in pre-tablet days (electronic tablets, not medicinal), two subjects which appeared like clockwork in our newspaper's letters columns invariably provoked amusement among the staff because of the monotonous regularity of their arrival, and because there were no absolute answers to either: namely, do hedgerows cause snowdrifts? And, does ivy kill trees?
The first query, about hedges and snowdrifts, is particularly apt in rural Norfolk because of the maze of narrow, hedged lanes, some little more than farm approach roads, which jigsaw across the landscape and which, in winter, invariably seem to fill with snow, often leaving travel a pretty difficult prospect.
Many attempts were made by many people to answer the question (is it the hedgerows which create the drifting? and would there be drifting if the hedges were taken out?) to which the best available answer always seemed to be, 'Well, it depends.' On wind direction and snow intensity, the angle of the drifting flakes, the strength of the wind, the height of the hedges, and the orientation of the lane in question. That sort of thing. The question about ivy was just as complicated.
Ivy, some correspondents maintained, is invasive, it strangles trees and harbours nasty slugs and snails. Others underlined the point by indicating the high numbers of dead and dying trees in the county (which admittedly has many trees in late maturity) with ivy clinging to their crowns in what really looks like a deadly embrace. It was difficult to shake them from their ideas.
We only began to come across the works of the Ivy League commandos some time later. In the 1990s our office-based walking group, while on its yomps, increasingly came across trees supporting the tentacles of dead ivy. Further investigations showed that someone else was out and about evidently carrying a knife or a little saw, and that if they came across a tree with a good coating of ivy then they cut or sawed through the lowest strands, disconnecting it from its roots and thus leaving the mass of fronds and strands to die.
We never saw anyone actually doing it, but either there was a large number of dedicated commandos, carrying their little saws, or there was a small and very energetic elite corps.
Quite what they actually achieved, or hoped to achieve, is beyond me. If a young, healthy tree has become top heavy because of the size of its ivy bundle, then fine, cut it down. But the other complaints seemed to me to be utterly outweighed by the benefits of this vigorous and busy plant. Ivy protects its own soil and its resident insects from frost, gives spiders a home, provides nectar and protein via its flowers and berries, and shelters small birds. In fact, most mature ivy plants host entire communities of insects and spiders, which in turn help to feed the birds.
Does ivy kill trees? Only inadvertently, I'm sure. Ivy is just particularly good at taking advantage of rotting or weakened bark, or even the trunk of a dying or already dead tree.
I'm not a particular fan of ivy, which can sometimes exude a gloomy feeling, but it does annoy me when someone else tries to kill it. Live and let live, I say.